Today, December 6, Bishkek joined Zero TB Cities international initiative aiming to reduce tuberculosis disease rate in cities, an important event happened during City Health Leadership Forum in Kyiv. Vice Mayor for social issues of the city of Bishkek Tatyana Anatolievna Kuznetsova and Executive Director of Stop TB Partnership Dr. Lucica Ditiu signed this long-waited for declaration.
Vice Mayor for social issues of the city of Bishkek Tatyana Anatolievna Kuznetsova:
“Early HIV detection is one of the important tasks in order to maintain and strengthen people’s health, achieving it to a large extent involves confronting stigma and discrimination.
Firstly, I would like to point out that Mayor’s Office of Bishkek acknowledges that stigma and discrimination create breeding ground for the epidemic spread. It is the social stigma and self-stigma that build barriers to HIV-testing as well as to its treatment and care.
In the beginning of this year the Mayor’s Office started active collaboration with the civil community and AFEW-Kyrgyzstan. Signing Paris Declaration and joining the initiative to facilitate activities in big cities have become the first steps of this collaboration. We commenced to design the first city program for HIV prevention that will be running for 2 years. Even though these questions largely fall into the domain of the Ministry of Health, it was important to us to make our contribution to people’s health. The document is now at Bishkek City Kenesh awaiting approval. After the paper is approved we hope to contribute about 10 million som from the municipal budget to HIV program. Expanding HIV-testing coverage is one the program priorities. According to expert estimations, about 35% of Bishkek citizen living with HIV are still unaware about their status. When we were discussing how to achieve this goal, we thought to start with ourselves. This is why the Office Administratives, including myself, and Heads of the structural departments publicly went to have their HIV-tests made during a large event as part of the World AIDS Day. This event was widely covered in social and mass media. When the authorities send such precise signals like this, citizen pay attention and stigma weakens.
Our next step together with AFEW-Kyrgyzstan is to start a large-scale training course for the employees of the local territorial departments about HIV, stigma being a keynote of the whole training course.
Next year we plan to start a working group at the City’s Healthcare Department. This group will bring together vulnerable communities and the Mayor’s Office in order to mutually discuss and plan activities within HIV prevention campaign. World Aids Day 2019 slogan is Communities Make The Difference. It is the close collaboration with the civil society and communities that will help us to eliminate stigma and discrimination in Bishkek”
Dina Masalimova, AFEW-Kyrgyzstan Programs Manager: “We would like to express our gratitude to the Mayor’s Office of the city of Bishkek for cooperation and openness to the new initiatives in healthcare. Our collaboration started in the beginning of 2019 under the framework of a PITCH project “Key populations and HIV and TB prevention priorities”. A number of meetings and panel sessions were held since then where the community and city’s healthcare representatives reported to the city authorities about difficulties and problems they face. In response, the Mayor’s Office committed to facilitate UNAIDS ambitious 90-90-90 goals by joining Paris Declaration. As the first step to implement its realization the Mayor’s Office developed a municipal program for HIV prevention together with AFEW experts. We are very glad that today the City Administration expressed their desire to step in the TB problem. It is particularly important since our research shows a large spectrum of medical and social difficulties TB patients are facing in the city. We would like to believe that signing of the ZERO TB Cities Declaration and active involvement of the Mayor’s Office of Bishkek would produce positive affect in the nearest future“.
About Zero TB Cities initiative
The purpose of the initiative is to create ‘islands of elimination’ that will contribute to lowering rates of TB and further support in implementing effective strategies on the national level.
The Initiative appeals to the local authorities to support and directly and actively participate in fighting TB in cities in close collaboration with the civil sector and other interested partners in order to achieve significant reduction of TB death rate and prevalence, develop comprehensive programs at those sites in local context, mobilize complimentary financial, technical and clinical resources, exchange the resources and experts between participating cities, as well as disseminate knowledge and generate global political will.
The Kyrgyz Republic is one of the countries that demonstrates the highest rate of TB prevalence in the European region. Like any other megapolis, Bishkek has higher concentration of key population groups with high risk of HIV and TB infection. By the end of 2018, estimated rates were as follow: living with TB – 76.9, deaths – 5.1 in 100,000 people. To ensure wellbeing of the population it is very important to grant access to high quality medical and social services to these population groups as well as focus at upholding human rights.
